Before lunch, prosecutor Sean Berkowitz questioned Jeff Skilling about an Enron employee he allegedly threatened to fire for distributing a report by Off Wall Street that was critical of Enron. Berkowitz said only that the man’s name was Keith Power, but didn’t go into detail. Skilling denied he’d ever done such a thing. Here’s a […]
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The discussion of value at risk, or VAR, continued until the lunch break. Jeff Skilling claimed that because Enron published its VAR numbers, investors had all the information they needed to understand how the company made its money. Skilling maintains that Enron’s earnings were immune to commodity prices, and that by publishing the VAR numbers, […]
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Prosecutor Sean Berkowitz has moved on to a discussion whether Enron was a trading company or, as Skilling likes to say, a “logistics” company. It’s a key issue, because trading companies carry far more risk than logistics companies — whatever they are — and as a result their stocks tend to trade at lower multiples. […]
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Dave Einsel: Getty Images Talk to the hand During the mid-morning break, Jeff Skilling’s lawyer, Dan Petrocelli, complained to a gaggle of reporters in the hallway that prosecutor Sean Berkowitz isn’t allowing his client to fully answer questions. “He literally could have conducted an examination putting a prop up there,” Petrocelli said, according to the […]
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We finally got a flash of Jeff Skilling’s famous temper. During the past two days, when Skilling seems about to explode, his attorney, Dan Petrocelli has jumped up with some sort of objection, giving his client a chance to calm down. This time, though, Skilling grew frustrated with prosecutor Sean Berkowitz questioning him about whether […]
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Actually, it was closer to 4,000 words. I counted. In yesterday’s testimony, Jeff Skilling acknowledged that he had given Jennifer Binder, a former girlfriend, $180,000 to start her own company, Photofete. Photofete, in turn, had a contract with Enron worth more than $450,000, although Skilling at one point said he thought it was only $3,000. […]
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Jeff Skilling is trying to explain the put option that Enron took on its own stock as part of the Raptor transactions. Skilling said “there was nothing unusual” about the put, and disagreed with the description that Enron was betting against its own stock. “What it was was a hedge,” Skilling said. “This is a […]
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The tone of Jeff Skilling’s cross examination is developing more of an edge. Skilling is contesting almost every assertion that prosecutor Sean Berkowitz makes, frequently responding that things aren’t as simple as the government contends. For example, Berkowitz is discussing the value of the troubled international assets. He reviewed documents from Enron’s Risk Analytics and […]
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